Just hours before Ashdod were due to open their Liga Leumit campaign against Hapoel Afula, the club's lawyers were making a very different case entirely — in front of the Israel Football Association's Supreme Court, trying to stop the match from being played at all.
According to ONE, MS Ashdod filed an urgent petition asking the tribunal to postpone the opening-round fixture, scheduled for August 18. The club's central claim is that going ahead with the game now would lock in an "irreversible reality" before the fallout from a serious indictment against Ironi Tiberias is fully known.
The Tiberias case sits at the heart of the request. That club stands accused, ONE has reported separately, of orchestrating a scheme of banned collective infusions for its players ahead of a decisive relegation match against Ashdod at the end of last season — the very fixture that helped decide which of the two clubs avoided the drop.
Should Tiberias ultimately be hit with sanctions such as a points deduction or relegation once the disciplinary process concludes, last season's final placings could effectively be rewritten. Ashdod's argument is that every match played in the meantime, under standings that may not survive scrutiny, narrows the tribunal's room to fix things retroactively.
"Each additional match that takes place before the picture is clarified expands reliance [on the current situation] and narrows future discretion," the club argued in its petition, as reported by ONE.
Hapoel Afula, drawn into a dispute that has nothing to do with them, pushed back hard. Their lawyer, Avishai Ifergan, told the tribunal Ashdod had sat on the request for weeks, filing only on Friday, August 14 — what he called the last possible moment — despite knowing the relevant facts since late July.
Afula's response also raised a procedural objection, arguing the petition lacked a supporting affidavit, which it called "a fundamental defect" in a filing of this kind. The club said postponement would cause it real, avoidable harm — leaving it without a match while rivals played and gained ground in a saga it has no part in — and questioned why only its fixture was being targeted rather than any of Tiberias's own matches in the top flight.
The petition was heard by a Supreme Court panel of judges Miguel Deutsch, Yaniv Vaki and Ortal Klein. Deutsch, according to ONE, sounded openly skeptical of Ashdod's reasoning during the hearing, telling the club's representatives their argument leaned heavily on speculation and that it was "difficult deciding based on hypotheses without concrete facts."
No ruling had been announced by the time of publication. With Ashdod's opening fixture bearing down, the tribunal's decision — whichever way it goes — will land just as the Liga Leumit season gets under way, with a club potentially starting its campaign under a cloud that events at Tiberias could yet lift, or deepen.
